Let’s face it, I’m a gadget girl (have got a house full of the things), and this is one of the best online gadgets I’ve found. David Jackmanson is a clever little tech geek, and I’ve shamelessly pinched this off his site. It’s a 90 second animated history of just who’s had control of the Middle East from the days of the Pharaohs until, ahem, now. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Beautifully. And it appeals to the repressed geographer in my soul.
Apart from boggling the mind, it manages to convey just why the region is so contested, and how difficult achieving anything resembling ‘peace’ in the area is likely to be. The portrait of the various Islamic empires – starting with the Caliphate – gives one an idea of where the Islamic world once was, and how the mighty have fallen. There’s a sense, too, of just how small and vulnerable Israel is, and why its leaders have been so determined to make sure they’re the haaardest nation on the block.
8 Comments
This seriously rocks.
Yeah, that’s good, sl. Saw it somewhere a while back and failed to link to it. A lot of people don’t realise it’s only about 10 miles from the west bank to Tel Aviv — within reach even of Qassam rockets.
If you like gadgets you should try the virtual tour of hell (Dante’s Inferno).
http://web.eku.edu/flash/inferno/
Those Sassinads and Seljuks have kind of not made it into my mental space.
See how the flexibility in the system ends after the UN and American largesse take over.
Its an absolutely starkly shown thing this sudden fixity of borders.
This is not going to last. Folks here look at some of the defense-talk elsewhere on this site and probably conclude that folks like me and some others are paranoid.
But the world will return to more fluidity of borders because the Americans won’t be everywhere leaking rivers of blood and red ink forever.
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Actually though this will lead to a more violent world the lack of national border fluidity was part of the problem in the 20th century.
Part of the problem that makes life more violent and continues to do so in the Middle East.
If we be cringing advocates of the status quo when it comes to borders then natural tensions don’t get worked out. and we have one less form of punishment to throw at dictators who give us gyp.
Of course we must maintain our own borders here in Australia but have defacto partial secession or to put it another way a more robust federalism.
But these highly violent areas…. A standard way of dealing with a troublesome neighbour would be to carve him up into small Emirates.
As small as possible yet cut up to take advantage of natural borders where they exist.
And make your border states vassal states in terms of their foreign policy.
And of course the interrogation of the regime leadership that gave you gyp would be part of it……..
…. A lot of the interrogation being at the end of a rope.
The death penalty for civilians and POW’s is no good. But if we want less war and less nasty war then defeated regimes with hateful human rights records should wind up at the end of a rope.
Unless they cut a deal to save the lives of their own people and yours early on.
One would think that talking talking talking and international forums and the UN and all this legalism would be the thing for humane society.
But things that work in the micro do not necessarily work in the Macro.
Mass extermination was helped along by this global collective security business. And by complicating ethical and military choices with one-sided legal restrictions.
Why do I suspect GMB still has a fallout shelter in his back garden?
sceptic
Fab site. My own view is that the incurably dopey UN made a spectacular error in 1947. Israel was always far, fat too small to be really viable. And there was no use creating a second Palestinian state west of the Jordan, when said “Palestinian” society was little more than serfs and gangsters.
While the middle east is ripe for an extreme makeover I loudly advocate the extension of Israel borders to at least the Jordan River and the Latani River. This will, of course, require the moving-of-house of the West Bank and Gaza Muslims. Tough titties! They have insisted on remaining “refugees” for sixty years, it is about time they started to be treated like every other refugee on the planet and be bloody grateful for resettlement anywhere!
People need to stop this tedious debating of the impossible “two state solution.”
p.s.
There are also a couple of books of maps, which cover this same history by Martin Gilbert. I remember convalescing at a relative’s house after an illness (or huge hangover; I can’t quite remember) and discovering these books of maps in the library. They can keep one fascinated for days.
They seem pretty viable to me. Despite arms export bans and a ring of hostile neighbours, they’ve beaten them back every time and have normal relations with Egypt and Jordan. Part of their survival strategy was to expand upon the UN mandate.
The longer the situation goes on, the more likely a two-state solution is. People want to settle down and don’t want to get displaced, regardless of their origins.
“Why do I suspect GMB still has a fallout shelter in his back garden?”
Because you are trying to be a smartarse is why. Don’t be ungrateful to the Americans fella. Because they won’t be covering the rest of us forever.
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Israel is the most viable country in the area in some respects. In the twentieth century, since we tried to get rid of war, we put the bar for war higher.
Therefore countries that have basically maintained a state of war against Israel the entire period of its existence have not always attracted retaliation.
But that would be one thing if we were conscious of this.
However it leads to Israel retaliating against the pawns in Palestine. When they ought to have retaliated against the more important chess pieces in other countries.
In order for our own problems with these crackers to be at an end we would give enough assistance when Israel was actually fighting for her to solve some of these problems for us.
The last stoush was a case in point. This bullshit international law/ coupled with a very disturbing level of denial when it comes to regime leadership and terrorism……
…. meant that Israel got third party civilians killed and her own soldiers in a country that was not in and of itself a Jihadist country.
Whereas she just ought to have bombed Damascus/ Riyadh and Tehran until such time as they handed over the hostages.
She should have taken that approach years ago.
But the time where she can safely do so is running out.